Some people complain – quite wrongly – that Apple’s design team is there solely to fight with the engineers. The thinking goes that Jony Ive spends his days doodling beautiful, thin boxes with no ports, and the engineering team then argues to get things like screens, batteries and data ports put back in.

Utter nonsense, of course, but at Sonos, it appears that this is just the way things work: The shape of its new $700 Sonos Sub was picked by customers (customers!) and then the Sonos engineers had to make a speaker to fit inside.